The two phases of The Beatles

The two phases of The Beatles

In 1973, three years after the break-up of the Beatles, two compilation albums were released: The Red Album and The Blue Album. The red album contains a collection of the best songs of the 7 albums made between 1962-1966. The blue album contains a collection of the best songs from the 6 albums released between 1967-1970.

An interesting question is, why decided Apple Records to split up the songs in two compilation albums instead of releasing one all-embracing album. According to Mark Steffen[1], the lifetime of the Beatles can be divided into different phases. He calls the time of The Red Album a phase where the songs were “dance songs whose themes were girls and falling in love.” After this phase the Beatles changed, they only wrote songs in the studio, became more individualistic and they grew their hair. The songs in time of The blue Album had a different theme and sound as the group explored many new forms of music. The most famous example is the adding of a sitar in their song.

That the Beatles changed during their lifetime is clear, but was 1967 a clear turning point to split up the two compilation albums? Or is there a better point in time to divide their music?

Used playlists

Songs used shown per album per period

In this plot can be seen that in both periods almost the same number of songs were written. Hover to get the song and album information.

The Red Album

The Blue Album

The Beatles changed over time

Valence, energy and duration over time per album

• Valence (positiveness) per song
• Energy per song
• Duration per song in seconds

The songs are ordered by year and album.

• It looks like the valence becomes lower over time
• It looks like the energy becomes lower over time
• These two categories become more spread out.

A downward trend in valence and energy visible.

Valence and Energy over time per album.

There is a downward trend visible in valence and energy.

The chroma analysis of Abbey Road song come together.

Chroma analysis of the song come together

The extracted notes are pretty good. The song is written in D-minor, which also is visible in the chroma feature. Also interesting is to see is that mainly D and C# are used a lot in the end of the song. This is correct and part of the outro.

Chordograms and Keygrams don’t like The Beatles

Chordogram of the song come together

When we look at this chordogram, you’ll think the key of this song is C minor or Eb major. The internet disagrees, tabs.ultimate-guitar.com says the key is Dm and also when I play along on the piano, I think Dm is the right key.

• The song doesn’t have a lot of triads.
• The pitch is not based on 440Hz

The last reason is possible because it was harder to tune your instruments in the 60s. Also, the producers speeded the songs which adjusted the key of a song.

A lot of repetition visible in the Come Together Self-Similarity

Self-Similarity Matrix of the song Come Together

In the Self-Similarity Matrix, it is visible that Come Together is a structured song with a lot of repeating parts. Notice that the chorus of the song is fairly short, but repeats four times. Also, interesting to see is that at the same timestamp, the most used notes change in the chroma analysis.

The last interesting thing is that, like in the chroma analysis and the chordogram, the outro is clearly visible and repeats itself a lot.

Conclusion

In the plots, you can see The Beatles changed over time. They started as a band with high energy and valence, but in a few years, they evolved into a more diverse band with songs with high and low energy and high and low valence.

For now, it seems like Apple Records made a good choice dividing the compilation album into two parts. In further work, it would be interesting to look into the evolving of valence in time and to analyze if 1967 was the best splitting point when you look at Spotify’s features.